Cremona, home of Stradivari, once hung an enemy army's trousers in its cathedral
Cremona is famous for violins by Stradivari, Guarneri and the Amati family. Its medieval citizens had a rougher sense of pride: after beating Parma's army and capturing its ceremonial war cart, they reportedly kept the enemy's trousers dangling from the cathedral ceiling for centuries.
The city sits on the left bank of the Po in Lombardy. It first appears as a settlement of the Cenomani, Gauls who arrived around 400 BC, though the name likely predates them and baffled ancient writers. In 218 BC Rome made it its first colony north of the Po, founded the same year as Piacenza across the river, and it grew rich on the road linking Genoa to Aquileia. Backing the wrong side against Augustus cost it dearly: in 40 BC its land was seized for veterans, and the poet Virgil, who had gone to school there, lost his family farm for a time. In AD 69 Vespasian's troops sacked the city, an event Tacitus recorded.
It was flattened again by the Lombard king Agilulf in 603 and rebuilt in 615 on the orders of Queen Theodelinda. Its bishops then grew powerful as imperial vassals. A local legend says the city's leader Giovanni Baldesio unhorsed Emperor Henry IV in a duel, sparing Cremona its yearly tribute of a 3 kg golden ball, which went to his sweetheart as a dowry. As a free commune from 1093 it switched between emperor and Lombard League, helping defeat Barbarossa at Legnano in 1176, and around 1301 it held up to 80,000 people, more than its 69,000 in 2001.
Under the Visconti and Sforza it became part of the Duchy of Milan, and in 1441 it hosted the wedding of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti. Legend credits that feast with inventing Cremona's torrone nougat, apparently a 20th-century fabrication.
Music came before the violins. The 12th-century cathedral anchored regional musical life, and by the 16th century the city was a renowned centre. Marc'Antonio Ingegneri taught there, and his most famous pupil, Claudio Monteverdi, left for Mantua in 1591. Its bishop Nicolo Sfondrati, a keen music patron, became Pope Gregory XIV in 1590.
Source: Cremona
